The Dead Lie Down (40 page)

‘So’s the way Seed’s mind works. He’s a craftsman. Whatever his motives, there’s nothing crude or obvious about them. How can there be? A man who confesses to a non-murder. An atheist who leads a secret life as a Quaker . . .’

‘Maybe he’s been infiltrating all the major religions,’ said Charlie. ‘Maybe Monday’s his Quaker day, Tuesday he’s a Hindu . . .’ She sighed, bored by her own joke. ‘I’m going back to Spilling after lunch to talk to Kerry Gatti. I need to do something under my own steam. Want to come?’

‘No.’

Charlie gave him a look. ‘Tell me you’re not crazy enough to try to get near Stephen Elton.’ She pulled her phone out of her bag and switched it on, now that she was as sure as she could be that she and Simon had stopped fighting. ‘Olivia,’ she told him, listening to her sister’s message. ‘She wants us to go round. I asked her to find out as much as she could about Martha Wyers.’

‘A name you didn’t mention to our metropolitan friends,’ said Simon.

‘Because there’s probably no link.’

‘So we’re not going to Olivia’s?’

‘We’re going. She said she’s got something I’ll want to see. Though admittedly, based on past experience, that might turn out to be a picture of Angelina Jolie’s new baby in
Hello!
In which case, I’ll beat her to death with a spade.’

‘After what we’ve just seen, I’m not in the mood for jokes like that.’ Simon had finished his pizza and moved on to Charlie’s.

Her phone vibrated, knocking against her plate. She picked it up. ‘Liv?’

‘It isn’t,’ said Sam Kombothekra, whose peculiar way of answering questions with ‘It is’ or ‘I did’ instead of a simple ‘Yes’ always made Charlie smile. ‘It’s Sam,’ he said.

‘I’d never have guessed.’

‘Is Simon with you?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Strange things are happening here, Charlie. I thought you’d both want to know. But listen, if the Snowman finds out I’ve discussed any of it with you . . .’

‘Relax, Sam. He’s not tapping your phone. What strange things?’

‘Have you met a DS Coral Milward?’

‘This morning.’

‘Seems she’s Proust’s new soulmate. He’s just told me my team’s at DC Dunning’s disposal for the foreseeable future. No explanation, no details as yet.’

‘So they’re not as stupid as they look,’ said Charlie. ‘They’ll want you to work the Spilling angle—Bussey, Seed and Trelease. It’s good.’ She looked at Simon. ‘Means they’re taking us seriously.’

‘I told Proust it was crazy not to have Simon with us on this. Do you know what he said? “The extent of Waterhouse’s involvement in Gemma Crowther’s murder has yet to be determined.” Can you believe that?’

Charlie repeated the quote to Simon, who shook his head in disgust. ‘Ask Kombothekra what he said in response.’

Charlie tried to pass him the phone but he backed away from it. Was he angry with Sam? ‘Wrap it up,’ he muttered, glaring at Charlie.

‘Sam, I’m going to have to—’

‘He only said it for effect. He knows exactly why Simon was outside Gemma Crowther’s place on Monday: he’d followed Aidan Seed, who, as we now know, was not only at the scene but had a motive the size of a . . . a . . .’ Sam stopped, unable to think of anything big enough.

‘Motive?’ Charlie prodded Simon to make sure he was paying attention.

‘No one’s told you?’ Sam sighed. ‘I don’t know why I’m surprised. Who’d want to break a case when they can score a point instead, right?’

‘Sam, for fuck’s sake! What’s the motive?’

‘Crowther and her partner Stephen Elton both served time for false imprisonment and GBH.’

‘
What?
’

‘Elton got parole in March 2005, Crowther in October 2006. Somebody’s idea of justice.’

Charlie frowned. This didn’t sound like Sam. Normally he was determined to find potential and promise in every scrote that crossed his path. ‘Devout Quakers and GBH don’t often go together.’

‘However devout they went on to become, in April 2000 they tied a defenceless woman to a pillar in their back garden so that Gemma Crowther could spend
three days
forcing stones down her throat and launching them at her face and body—stones from a garden she’d designed for them. They didn’t feed her or allow her to drink, didn’t let her use the toilet, nearly suffocated her with a bath sponge and parcel tape. She was in hospital for three weeks, left scarred for life and probably infertile.’

Stones from a garden she’d designed
. . . ‘Sam . . . oh, my God.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, exhaling slowly. ‘Makes it a bit harder to mourn Crowther’s passing, doesn’t it?’

‘The defenceless woman was Ruth Bussey,’ said Charlie, looking at Simon. ‘She was their victim.’

When I wake, my head is clear. I know where I am straight away. All the details of this room are familiar, though I saw them for the first time only last night: blue and white checked bedspread and pillowcases, beige loop carpet, the loop so coarse it makes me think of a bathmat. Small, square pine cabinets on either side of the bed, a pine dressing table with a three-sectioned mirror at one end of the room, a wooden blanket chest at the other. Yellow curtains with red and gold tasselled tie-backs. I can hear banging coming from downstairs that sounds like crockery, and a radio.

I’m in Garstead Cottage, in the grounds of Villiers school—the cottage Martha Wyers’ parents rent, and allow Mary to use.
We’ll be safe there
—that’s what she said. I have fallen out of my life and into hers.

I pull back the bedclothes. I’m wearing the pyjamas Mary threw at me last night, too tired by that point even to speak: they’re pink, with ‘Minxxx’ printed across the top. The soft moans of animals from outside draw me over to the window. I open the curtains and look at the view in daylight: fields full of cows, a wall separating the farmland from the school’s land, the square-towered stone bulk of the main school building at the top of the steeply rising path. It’s the building Mary painted, the picture I saw in her house.

Garstead Cottage nestles in a dip beside the path, a few metres beyond Villiers’ main gates. It’s down a level from the land around it and has an air of being hidden. Last night, Mary told me I didn’t need to bother closing the curtains. ‘No one ever looks in,’ she said. ‘Not girls and not teachers. It’s like being in the middle of nowhere.’

The door opens and she walks in. ‘Late breakfast,’ she says. ‘Actually, it can double as late lunch.’ She’s wearing a grey T-shirt with blue paisley pyjama bottoms and carrying a large blue cloth-bound hardback book. Horizontally, in both hands. Balanced on top is a teapot trailing a green label on a piece of string, a cup, and a sandwich overhanging the edges of a saucer that’s too small for it. ‘I’m hoping it’s not every day someone brings you peppermint tea and a Marmite sandwich on a tray. Well, a book,’ she corrects herself. In the pocket of her pyjama bottoms I can see the outline of her cigarette packet.

Something has changed. I’m not scared of her any more.

Pieces of last night start to come back to me: Mary’s insistence that she couldn’t tell me; she had to show me. She didn’t want to talk while she drove, so we listened to the radio for a while. Then she put a CD on; the ‘Survivor’ song started to play. ‘Martha was playing this when she hanged herself,’ Mary said matter-of-factly. ‘Odd choice, don’t you think? If you’re going to commit suicide, why play a song that’s all about coping without somebody, growing wiser and smarter and stronger?’

‘Maybe . . .’ That was as much as I could say. I didn’t feel comfortable speculating.

‘Irony, do you think? I don’t think so. Arrogance: that’s what I think it was.’

I asked her what she meant, but she frowned and shook her head. ‘Not tonight,’ she said. ‘Not if you want me to get us there intact.’ Then she took her mobile phone out of the glove compartment, saying she had to ring Villiers. She asked for someone called Claire. I listened as she ordered her to contact the local police, to meet us and them at Garstead Cottage in two hours’ time.

‘Why the police?’ I asked.

‘It’s my routine,’ said Mary, turning up the volume on the stereo so that I couldn’t say anything else.

As we pulled in through the school’s large sculpted iron gates, the police car was ahead of us. Claire Draisey, who turned out to be Villiers’ Director of Boarding, was waiting for us next to the side door of Garstead Cottage, taking shelter from the drizzle in a partially covered wooden outbuilding that was attached to the house. In it were two old bicycles, a watering can and a large cardboard cut-out of a cow in profile, a cow wearing a yellow earring. I didn’t register the oddness of this until later; at the time, it seemed one of the less odd aspects of the situation.

Claire Draisey’s manner was brisk, impatient. ‘This has to be the last time, Mary,’ she said. She was wearing a red dressing-gown and slippers, and looked exhausted. I’d warned Mary that everyone at the school might be asleep, but she’d dismissed my concern. ‘They get woken up all the time,’ she said. ‘It’s a boarding school—goes with the territory. The staff who are soft enough to need to rest don’t live on site. In exchange for their beauty sleep, they’re frowned upon and overlooked for promotion. ’

Strangest of all was what Claire Draisey didn’t say: she didn’t ask Mary what or who she was worried about, why she wanted the police to check the house. The policeman who was there didn’t ask either. He and Draisey had a familiar manner around one another, as though they’d done this many times before. He checked that all the doors and windows were secure. He and Mary went into the cottage together and checked for intruders. Mary asked him if he’d wait outside in his car until it was light, but Claire Draisey said, ‘Don’t be silly, Mary. Of course he can’t.’

‘This time there’s been an actual threat,’ Mary told her. ‘It’s not only myself I’m worried about.’ She indicated me. It made me feel flustered. So does the breakfast and tea on a tray. I don’t want to like Mary, not after what she did to me at Saul’s gallery. If she can attack me and still be a good person, what does that say about me?

‘I can say their names,’ I tell her as she puts the sandwich into my hands. ‘The people who lived at Cherub Cottage. I’ve called them Him and Her for years. I couldn’t write their names when I wrote you the letter. But now that you know the story, I can say them. He was called Stephen Elton. She was called Gemma Crowther.’

‘Was?’

‘Is.’

Mary nods. ‘I know.’

‘What?’ The air around me thins out. I feel dizzy, as if I’ve been deprived of oxygen.

‘There’s a lot I need to tell you.’

‘You can’t know their names. It’s not possible.’

‘You’d better sit down,’ she says, bending to pick something up. The sandwich. I didn’t realise I’d dropped it. I stay on my feet.

‘After that day at Saul Hansard’s gallery, when you tried to force me to sell you my painting, I was scared. You were too keen. I didn’t trust you. I thought you—’ She breaks off, tuts at her inability to say what needs to be said. ‘I convinced myself that you meant me harm. I . . . I had to know who you were, who’d put you up to it. As far as I could see, it could only be one person.’

‘Aidan?’ I guess.

‘Aidan.’

‘But . . .’

‘It won’t make any sense to you, not yet. Not until I show you what he did to me.’ Mary sits down on the bed, pulls her cigarettes and lighter out of her pocket. ‘I told Saul I wanted to write to you and apologise. He wouldn’t give me your address, but he told me your name, said I could write to you care of the gallery. I
was
sorry, or rather, I was prepared to be, if it turned out . . .’

‘What?’ I say.

‘I had to know why you wanted that picture so much. It was unnatural, the way you latched on to it, as if you
had
to have it. Have you heard of First Call?’

‘No.’

Mary lights a cigarette, inhales. ‘They’re a firm of private investigators in Rawndesley. Someone I used to know works there. I paid him to find out about you. Your background, everything—as much as there was to know about you, I wanted to know it.’

‘The man with the red bobble hat and the dog.’

‘You saw him?’

‘He kept walking past my house. Looking in at the windows.’

‘You were suspicious of him even with the hat and the dog?’ She almost smiles. ‘I’ll have to tell him he’s wrong. He thinks they make him look innocuous. He’s a bit of a clown, but he got the job done, gave me the information I wanted. From him, I found out about your religious background, your award-winning garden design business.’ She pauses, as if reluctant to state the obvious. ‘And what happened to you in April 2000. Gemma Crowther and Stephen Elton, the court case.’

My skin feels as if tiny bugs are crawling over every inch of it.
A stranger watching me, reporting back to Mary . . .

‘I’ve hired him before, successfully. I knew he could dredge up anything of interest. First Call mainly work for insurance and credit card companies, on fraud cases, but they’ve got one or two people who specialise in what they call “matters that require complete discretion”. He’s one of them.’

She shrugs. ‘What can I say? I’m sorry. He followed you for a few weeks—weeks during which, by all accounts, you hardly left the house. When he told me that, I felt terrible. It was never my intention to drive you out of your job and turn you into a recluse. There was no way I could have known what had happened to you in Lincoln.’ Mary bites her lip. ‘I’m sure my impassioned self-justification speech is the last thing you want to hear. Anyway . . . I had him keep an eye on you long enough to satisfy me that you had no connection, past or present, to Aidan Seed, and then I called him off.’

‘I saw him on Sunday. And Monday,’ I tell her.

Her expression hardens. ‘When a cop turned up on Friday asking about Aidan, I panicked. I’d thought things were stable; clearly they weren’t. I needed to know what had changed. And then Charlie Zailer came round on Monday morning to tell me you were Aidan’s girlfriend. About fifteen minutes after she left my house, I got a call from First Call telling me the same thing.’